“One death is a tragedy; 1
million is a statistic,” Joseph
Stalin is supposed to have
said. The more people we see
suffering, the less we care. It’s
an unfortunate quirk that psychologists
so far have blamed on
our brains: Humans are tuned
to individuals, the thinking
goes; we are just not capable of
feeling compassion for whole
groups.

A new study calls that
comfortable conclusion into
question. “The collapse of compassion
is an active process,”
says Daryl Cameron, a doctoral
candidate in...

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